Category Archives: Science

THE 23 WORDS THAT MAY BE 15,000 YEARS OLD.

THE 23 WORDS THAT MAY BE 15,000 YEARS OLD. This analysis in the Washington Post by Wilson Andrews and David Brown graphically presents the 23 words that researchers have identified as “ultraconserved”, having persisted approximately 15,000 years. Cognates for these … Continue reading

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HOW LONG DO WORDS LAST?

HOW LONG DO WORDS LAST? Lee Bryant sent me this article by David Brown in the Washington Post about the persistence of words. Researchers have taken the controversial position that they have identified 23 words that have survived for 15,000 … Continue reading

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WAITING YEARS FOR A DROP OF LIQUID.

WAITING YEARS FOR A DROP OF LIQUID. I posted here in February 2012 about an experiment that had been running for 85 years to determine how viscous tar pitch is. In the 85 years, eight drops of tar pitch had … Continue reading

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A BLOG THAT REPORTS ON RETRACTIONS.

A BLOG THAT REPORTS ON RETRACTIONS. The article by Yudhijit Battacharjee contains a link to the Retraction Watch blog, which is devoted to reporting on scientific articles which are retracted. The number of retractions is surprising. I counted posts on … Continue reading

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A PREFERENCE FOR CLEAR RATHER THAN MESSY RESULTS.

A PREFERENCE FOR CLEAR RATHER THAN MESSY RESULTS. The New York Times magazine (April 28) had an article by Yudhijit Bhattacharjee about Diederick Stapel, a Dutch social psychologist, who published a number of fraudulent papers based on data which he … Continue reading

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SPREADSHEET ERRORS (COMMENT).

SPREADSHEET ERRORS (COMMENT). In a comment on this post, Henry Nejako pointed out an article in New York magazine about how a graduate student had found “a major flaw in an influential 2010 economic paper by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth … Continue reading

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DID TOOLS CHANGE MAN’S BODY?

DID TOOLS CHANGE MAN’S BODY? I am accustomed to think of Darwinian natural selection as reflecting the adaptation of a species to a changing natural environment. This article by Sarah Reardon in NewScientist reports on new evidence that evolution may … Continue reading

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SMALL SAMPLES—ANOTHER PROBLEM WITH PUBLISHED ARTICLES.

SMALL SAMPLES—ANOTHER PROBLEM WITH PUBLISHED ARTICLES. I have posted, for example here, about studies by John Ioannidis and others which find that about one third of frequently cited scientific papers turn out to be wrong. Among the reasons is a … Continue reading

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TWIN STUDIES ARE NOT ABOUT TWINS.

TWIN STUDIES ARE NOT ABOUT TWINS. Annalisa, knowing my interests, gave me this link to a post about a famous set of identical twins. They were born in 1933 and separated at six months, with one being raised by his … Continue reading

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380,000 YEARS AFTER THE BIG BANG.

380,000 YEARS AFTER THE BIG BANG. I began this blog with a post about the evidence of the Big Bang in our night sky. I was astounded that scientists had been able to find data about an event that took … Continue reading

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